How the Gunne Sax Dress Went From Cliché to Cool

Of all the fashionable revivals of the past year—couture-like structure at Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga, ’80s polish at Louis Vuitton, rave culture at Marc Jacobs, Princess Di-isms everywhere—the most surprising and humble is that of the flounced, puffed, and laced Gunne Sax dress. Still affordable, these vintage frocks are increasingly collectible and have moved beyond cliché into the realm of cool. “Who doesn’t love a little lace-up bodice, a little flounced hem?” muses Vogue.com Culture Editor Alessandra Codinha. “There’s just something about it!”

And how. Victoriana has been making the rounds of late. We spied it on Dries Van Noten’s Spring runway; at the Critics’ Choice Awards, where Lily Collins selected a sigh-worthy Elie Saab Couture confection; and at One World Trade Center on Vogue.com Market Editor Chelsea Zalopany, who on the day she wore a high-neck, bow-tied, and yoked number to work, wryly captioned her office selfie “business casual.”

My coworker’s offhand comment speaks volumes about the transformation of the Gunne Sax dress in popular imagination. At its ’70s zenith, the brand was largely associated with an informal kind of dressing up. When office colleagues talk of Gunnes, they speak of graduations and weddings and proms. (In 1979 the Gunne Sax label became a junior line and the designer cornered the occasion-dress market under her own name, Jessica McClintock, building an empire worth many tens of millions of dollars.) “I sell romance and fantasy,” McClintock told People in 1984. She communicated those qualities by incorporating Victorian, Edwardian, and medieval touches into her designs, while also popularizing a very Laura Ingalls Wilder–style prairie look that suited the time.

Gunne Sax was founded in San Francisco in 1967 (the year of the Summer of Love) by home sewers Elle Bailey and Carol Miller, and its name, recalls the former’s son, was “an adaptation of ‘sexy gunny sack’” (e.g., the rough bags used for potatoes and sack races). “Hippies didn’t talk about the clothes they wore; they were beyond that. That’s why Gunne Sax was so important in those days,” explained McClintock—who joined the company soon after it was founded, becoming a partner and then the sole owner. “It was a stamp for them. They used to wear them in the parks, getting married—the long calico dresses, barefoot and all.” (Fun fact: Hillary Rodham wore a GS dress when she married Bill Clinton in 1975.) Broadly speaking, the brand might be described as the American country cousin to Ossie Clark’s haute hippie fantasies or Laura Ashley’s British dream world. The aesthetic has always been a homely bohemian one that’s woven through with fantasy.

Zalopany says she gets “a real rush of my childhood, and playing dress-up, and all things romantic and make-believe” when she wears her Gunne. The storybook, even fairy-tale quality of GS dresses is undeniable and has contributed to their popularity not only stateside but in Japan. In 2008, when Tobe Naoaki opened a vintage shop called Grimoire in Tokyo, managed by It-girl Hitomi Nomura, they put the Dolly Kei look on the street style map. With its frills and furbelows, Gunne Sax is a perfect fit for this style, a deliberately saccharine one built around Western vintage pieces. Inspired by porcelain dolls, the Dolly kei style incorporates gothic, Lolita, and mori kei (forest girl) elements, as well.

At the end of what was, for many, an annus horribilis, the escapist fantasy aspect of Gunne Sax dresses resonates and makes them look fresh, not frumpy. To choose one is to indulge in nostalgia, to find comfort in clichéd prettiness, and, perhaps, to imagine oneself at home on an idealized range.